With the advancement of conventional video technologies, a growing number of Independent Content Providers (ICPs) provide video media to consumers (e.g., MOVIELINK® of Santa Monica, Calif. and CINEMA NOW® of Santa Monica, Calif.). These video technologies include, for example, Video-On-Demand (VOD) movies, Pay-per-view movies, and downloadable movies, to name a few. Each video media has video metadata associated with it that describes the video content. More generally, metadata is defined as data about data, and metadata commonly describes aspects of a tangible thing, such as a movie, an audio compact disc (CD), a digital video disc (DVD), a theatrical performance, or a concert, to name a few. In the case of video media, typical metadata includes several pieces of information, such as movie title, movie year, and movie rating, among others. The video metadata is very useful, not only because it describes the content of the video media, but also because it provides a basis for combining both video media and metadata associated with the video media from several providers.
Unfortunately, each individual ICP uses its own proprietary video metadata format, and often the formats of different ICPs are incompatible with each other. Because the format of the metadata from each provider is different, integrating metadata from multiple providers has proven difficult. Although transfer of some metadata pertaining to each video media from different providers is possible, recognizing and providing the majority of the metadata for consumption by an end user client is difficult, as the different formatting of various providers makes integration from various sources difficult. Moreover, such techniques ultimately fail to utilize the metadata effectively if they are unable to provide the majority of relevant metadata to the client.
Conventional techniques provide only limited amounts and types of metadata and provide no guidance to content providers regarding a common formatting scheme for use with video media metadata. Accordingly, a solution that enables metadata to be validated as conforming to a global video format schema or converted to a global video format schema so that the metadata may be readily organized for consumption by clients is desired.